Stay tuned for In Our Range on the way next, brought to you by Westgate Nursing Rehabilitation and Assisted Living Center.
You are listening to a special presentation of In Our Range.
This is part one of a two-part interview with Larry Peterson commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Papst Mine Disaster in 1926.
Good morning and welcome to In Our Range.
I'm your host, Mike LeBeau.
Joining me this morning is local artist and historian, also my mentor and buddy, Larry Peterson.
He's here this morning to talk about the centennial of the pap's mind disaster at G. Shaft on September 4, 1926.
Three minor electricians were killed when a cave-in occurred, crushing their elevator at the bottom of the shaft.
Forty-three miners were trapped for 130 hours as the nation held their breath, waiting for news.
The miners were trapped on the eighth level of G-shaft and survived by thinking quickly to protect their level from subsequent cave-ins.
The leadership of mining Captain Tom Travartha is also credited for keeping the men focused and their spirits up.
The disaster's centennial will be commemorated next week with a series of events.
On Thursday, September 24th, at 6 p.m., the event 100 years later, the Pap's Mind Disaster Roundtable Discussion, will feature Larry Peterson, local author Bruce Cox, and historian and preservationist Ivan Helen.
This event is scheduled to be held at the Ironwood Carnegie Library.
However, due to increasing interest, the event may be moved to the Memorial Building to accommodate a larger audience, so stay tuned for that information, folks.
On Saturday, September 26, there will be tours of the past G and H shafts from 1-3pm with participants meeting at the Bonnie Road Trailhead of the Miners Memorial Park.
Also on September 26, that 6.30pm, an event entitled Echoes from the Eighth Level will be held at the Ironwood Memorial Building.
There will be memorial service with hymns, tributes, and benediction.
Local history presenter Bill Jamerson will perform songs and tell stories.
Ivan Helen will give a historical presentation.
A video of a radio play by a history curator Ray Marine will be shown.
There will also be a documentary film feature by TV6 Marquette.
Joining me to discuss the events of the Perhaps Mine Disaster and the upcoming events is Larry Peterson.
Thanks for joining us, Larry.
How are you doing?
Pretty good.
Yeah, so you and I have been talking about this since we've been talking, really.
putting it in my ear since we first met.
Centennial was coming up.
So I know you must be happy to see that it's going to be several of them.
I bet you, you know, the whole time I've been nagging you probably seems like a hundred years.
So, you know, I mean, this is it's time to really sit down and sort of reevaluate what we are, you know, not just now, but, you know, in what we're doing with these events, which are celebrating
But at the same time, acknowledging, celebrating the fact that we got 43 guys out of ground that had been, you know, 727 feet, you know, for 130 hours, you know.
But if you're a gerbil, I suppose it's all right.
But you put human beings in close quarters like that.
Even guys that are used to it.
With about, you know, about 50% of the time that they're down there is sort of a question mark unknown.
Are we going to get out of here?
If you look at it from post-traumatic stress syndrome or whatever you want to label it, look at what these guys went through.
And to sort of, you know, that's where the empathy
And all is sort of really, really needed.
Yeah.
So we celebrate the rescue of 43 miners trapped on the eighth level of G shaft, but we also commemorate and memorialize the three electricians who did die.
And then it also begs the larger question of the many numbers of individual incidents and smaller incidents that we had here on the range where were miners are left down there.
and passed away and didn't come back up.
We'll get to all that but let's talk about the morning of September 24th.
So it had been raining right and the weather was turning cold in September and we got rain and rain and rain.
And there had been some worries about G-shaft going back for quite a while, actually.
You loaned me some newspapers.
I found stuff from 1913 that talked about safety problems, and they were going to make sure G-shaft was OK back 13 years before this event.
I wish we had the time to really, really get into it.
But on the morning of September 24th, it had been raining, ground was soggy and loose.
Three electricians got into the shaft elevator there, Thomas Rowell, Gustav Sell,
and Avar Gustafson got in and an inspection had just been done on the shaft and those guys had gotten out.
The three electricians got in and then this cave in occurs and it's likely the most recent thing that caused it was all the rain.
And at first it sort of trapped them and then it crushed them all the way down to the bottom of that shaft there.
The football had been showing signs of giving for a long time.
One of the things that they were duly noting going up and down in that little elevator was the irregularity that they were hitting in the rail.
Now, something caused that, all right?
You have debris that is falling off the sides, as well as all that water that you're talking about.
You know, you got the kiddie pool on top there, and all this debris is falling off the column.
And then we talk about, you know, this is G-Shap we're talking about.
G shop never was stable.
Okay, right from the very beginning if you go back to the early history like if you look at some of the fatalities that mr. Cox says
you know, compiled in relation to the mining fatalities in Guggenburg, Coney as well as Iron Coney in Wisconsin.
G-Shaft's been sort of a problem with child, you know.
Yeah, and you mentioned Bruce Cox, who wrote the book Perfectly Safe.
He's written a bunch of books about mining history.
He's an incredible resource here.
Nearly everything that I've learned about this disaster comes from Bruce Cox's work.
Who'll be joining you at the roundtable with Ivan next Saturday.
So excited about that.
But you talked about how
how when they're going down this elevator there was this bump and there was some stuff sticking out and more than one person had noticed it and it's kind of one of those situations where
You know, if you're a little nervous about it and you mentioned it to somebody on the team, like, hey, you know, what's up with that bump right there?
It doesn't seem right.
It seems like the general answer was, oh, it just does that.
The condition of the small debris coming down from there because number one, it's falling out of the wall.
Some of it's practically floating.
You know, you got always reinforced steel concrete and stuff like that.
Hey, it's great to have all that reinforcement, but whatever it's
to if that's shifting, it doesn't matter.
That's exactly right.
You know, all you got is more concrete to clog the shaft opening.
And when you're, when you're working in conditions like that, I guess you just tell yourself everything's okay until it isn't.
Until it isn't that.
Yeah.
You
know, and so this cave-in, it causes the elevator to just plummet all the way to the bottom at which point it gets crushed.
by everything.
And then there were men working on different levels who were able to get out.
But the eighth level, they were trapped right underneath where a lot of the cave in got trapped.
Let me just get into the minutiae for one minute before they started getting out of hand.
Two of the apprentices were on top of the cage, okay, looking for damage, so they could get a better angle, spotting something.
Now debris, small pieces and stuff like that, probably drove them back inside of the cage, all right, and then you get all that accumulation that begins to happen on top of it, and all that torque that's going on with the cable that's holding it up, you know, these guys are gonna go 2600 feet.
So we got 43 men on the eighth level,
And, uh, Mining Captain Tom Travartha, who is a Cornish gentleman, I do believe.
A lot of experience in mining.
A well respected guy there.
He thought very quickly and right away they showed up the entrance to that tunnel on the eighth level in case there was another cave in so that they could at least have some place to hold up and be safe.
And it wasn't easy for these men at all.
Like, I mean, a good day wasn't easy in G-Cheft, but they didn't know how long they would be there.
They didn't know if they would get rescued.
They weren't sure that, you know, there was no radio, nothing going on, no telegraph.
And so Travartha, he did this amazing job of keeping the
focused on tasks.
You've got Polish miners in there, Finnish miners, Cornish miners, probably some Italian folks in there as well.
And one of the stories from Cox's book I found incredible was one of the ways that they passed the time was by seeing the hymns from their own church in their own language.
Right, but a lot of the turn of the century animosity isn't there, okay?
Ethnicism.
Not when you need each
other to
survive, right?
No, you know, friends are communicating, but Italians here, you come over, have some grappa, you meet my daughter.
You
know, it's becoming more Americanized, more than anything, but it still had those strong ethnic traditions, okay?
So there was the best of both worlds there.
where you could be an American and you could be as Italian as you wanted to be at the same time.
And that is just particularly true of minors, OK?
You learn to love your own race or your own nationality, but you also learn to love the guy's nationality that's next to you.
Oh, yeah.
When you guys are both made depend on it.
Yeah, your nationality in 30 seconds might be warm food.
Well, you know, one of those one of those ones to bring people together.
climb it you know hey it broke through and this guy is up on top and he grabs you okay I'm talking about life-changing situations that we're not even aware of or can necessarily weave into that history it doesn't unite that it didn't happen
While the men were down there, the story became national news and the nation was just gripped to the wire waiting for information.
There's probably, I'm sure there were radio updates, but print media just went wild with it.
The reporters came from everywhere.
And so these men are trapped down there.
They don't know how long they're going to be there.
Travartha had them all put their food together so they could ration
it.
There's an initial period of time where they have no contact
with each
other.
I mean, I don't know how many hours that would be or whatever.
Probably maybe the scene
seemed like it was on two days.
It seemed like it was a couple of days before they started to hear the
anxiety that that induced alone.
OK.
Yeah.
So, yeah, you know, to take a look at it from that standpoint.
Meanwhile, up at the top of the shaft, you've got wives and children and family and people from the city gathering.
Praying waiting these men are down there.
They're they're not sure what's going on They were trying lots of different ways, right?
They were trying to use a diamond drill down from the I think the seventh level Yeah, and then they tried to make a tunnel from f-shaft
So they could get this drill on the second level in
there
I'm trying to
go straight down at least get him air or something drop him some cigarettes
pills and everything else down there, you know and um
And now they did get a couple of levels, you know, but I mean, but they could hear this, you know, that's one of the first things that they did hear on it.
They were hearing explosions and
drilling, doing that dentist thing, you know, from from second level.
So
that, yeah, they also tried to make a tunnel from F shaft.
And I think they eventually made their way over from H, right?
Yeah, they were going to do a side track on a raise on G shaft and then come up above it and go right
down.
It was, you know, I mean, they were trying everything.
Well, they eventually just figured out a way from H shaft to kind of get over and they just on the fly built some ladders and lattices and did whatever they could to get up.
They did find a way to get
through one of the cave-ins that had fallen below the eighth level and then they found their way into G-Shap and they were able to get to these men.
I mean, going several hundred feet like that in jewelry rigging, you know,
after
things you're doing because the rungs aren't in the ladder anymore.
No, we're not, you know, you don't have that many miners on the ground and everybody's waiting around to go to the 16th floor.
I mean, it takes a long time and it's very dangerous.
I mean, it's dangerous with the ore that's being transported.
If you're in the same shaft with that and you're a passenger,
Come on, you wonder why you have accidents like this.
I mean and these guys they they tried to explore and find their own way out only to discover that they were trapped anyway they sliced it.
And then somehow, you know, these, and it was local miners doing the rescuing, you know, it was other miners that, you know, it wasn't in call in feds or one any of that.
It was just these guys got down there and just got straight to work.
And thankfully, you know, the mining companies gave them resources and support.
If you're going to have a work ethic, you know, if you're going to go at it, you know, trying to rescue yourself by shoveling and moving debris and all that, you got to understand, you're not at the same oxygen level.
No, and
you're gonna
have to sit down every five minutes or so because you're gonna fall on your face Okay, it's you don't know how much oxygen is available
and you don't know you don't know when you're gonna be fully out of food either They started drinking birch bark tea off the timber yeah, I
mean you talk about above and beyond yeah
Didn't have any middle metal struck for the birch bar,
you know I mentioned a minute ago the efforts of the mining companies themselves It seemed like there were some efforts.
I seem to remember you telling me a story about how they brought up Pullman cars Did they breathe I think you told me a story about how they brought up Pullman cars
People are beginning to like whether it's in relation to Pennsylvania coal fields or in this area or on the Masabi or one of these
They're trying to figure out how they can move ahead with binding safety practices.
Unfortunately, not all backwater areas are going to have the same degree of saturation.
Now, when you've got 43 guys that are underground for a while,
And we don't know if we're gonna get them all alive.
Yeah, you're gonna get noticed, especially on a national level, okay?
All of a sudden, the technology is falling.
You got a safety cart, this big Pullman.
And it's been out like...
a hospital on rails.
And that thing is on the PAPS property before you notice park, not
that
far from on a G chat.
If it was some guy, you know, or two guys that got trapped in a conventional accident, you know, or something like that.
Probably wouldn't happen.
Yeah.
So after 130 hours, uh, they finally start getting these men out and they, and this was not an easy thing.
I can't imagine what it had been like.
to have been trapped for 130 hours without much air like you were talking about, not much food.
And now you got to climb down from the eighth level down to what, the 22nd or just, you know, all the way down there down a ladder that's missing rungs, walking across planks that are slippery and wet because again, it's all wet down there.
And then I mean, you got to go down a thousand feet to go back up 2000 feet.
Then cap give vote.
You know, a captor was on there, they had to lock him up, you
know?
Many of them got on the surface though he moved,
you know,
because that's one of the things that's sort of part of the human element, the human side of this.
It's their family.
Get to the wife, get to the wife, get to the kids,
you know,
and I mean, through everything.
You
know, because you got people that just want to mob them, you're absolutely beside themselves.
That concludes part one of my interview with Larry Peterson to commemorate the centennial of the Papst Mine disaster.
Please join us Friday morning at 8 30 for in our range for the second part of this interview as we talk more about the disaster itself and the upcoming events to commemorate the centennial of the Papst Mine disaster.
Thanks for joining us here on in our range.
Stay tuned for In Our Range on the way next, brought to you by Westgate Nursing Rehabilitation and Assisted Living Center.
You are listening to a special presentation of In Our Range.
This is part one of a two-part interview with Larry Peterson commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Papst Mine Disaster in 1926.
Good morning and welcome to In Our Range.
I'm your host, Mike LeBeau.
Joining me this morning is local artist and historian, also my mentor and buddy, Larry Peterson.
He's here this morning to talk about the centennial of the pap's mind disaster at G. Shaft on September 4, 1926.
Three minor electricians were killed when a cave-in occurred, crushing their elevator at the bottom of the shaft.
Forty-three miners were trapped for 130 hours as the nation held their breath, waiting for news.
The miners were trapped on the eighth level of G-shaft and survived by thinking quickly to protect their level from subsequent cave-ins.
The leadership of mining Captain Tom Travartha is also credited for keeping the men focused and their spirits up.
The disaster's centennial will be commemorated next week with a series of events.
On Thursday, September 24th, at 6 p.m., the event 100 years later, the Pap's Mind Disaster Roundtable Discussion, will feature Larry Peterson, local author Bruce Cox, and historian and preservationist Ivan Helen.
This event is scheduled to be held at the Ironwood Carnegie Library.
However, due to increasing interest, the event may be moved to the Memorial Building to accommodate a larger audience, so stay tuned for that information, folks.
On Saturday, September 26, there will be tours of the past G and H shafts from 1-3pm with participants meeting at the Bonnie Road Trailhead of the Miners Memorial Park.
Also on September 26, that 6.30pm, an event entitled Echoes from the Eighth Level will be held at the Ironwood Memorial Building.
There will be memorial service with hymns, tributes, and benediction.
Local history presenter Bill Jamerson will perform songs and tell stories.
Ivan Helen will give a historical presentation.
A video of a radio play by a history curator Ray Marine will be shown.
There will also be a documentary film feature by TV6 Marquette.
Joining me to discuss the events of the Perhaps Mine Disaster and the upcoming events is Larry Peterson.
Thanks for joining us, Larry.
How are you doing?
Pretty good.
Yeah, so you and I have been talking about this since we've been talking, really.
putting it in my ear since we first met.
Centennial was coming up.
So I know you must be happy to see that it's going to be several of them.
I bet you, you know, the whole time I've been nagging you probably seems like a hundred years.
So, you know, I mean, this is it's time to really sit down and sort of reevaluate what we are, you know, not just now, but, you know, in what we're doing with these events, which are celebrating
But at the same time, acknowledging, celebrating the fact that we got 43 guys out of ground that had been, you know, 727 feet, you know, for 130 hours, you know.
But if you're a gerbil, I suppose it's all right.
But you put human beings in close quarters like that.
Even guys that are used to it.
With about, you know, about 50% of the time that they're down there is sort of a question mark unknown.
Are we going to get out of here?
If you look at it from post-traumatic stress syndrome or whatever you want to label it, look at what these guys went through.
And to sort of, you know, that's where the empathy
And all is sort of really, really needed.
Yeah.
So we celebrate the rescue of 43 miners trapped on the eighth level of G shaft, but we also commemorate and memorialize the three electricians who did die.
And then it also begs the larger question of the many numbers of individual incidents and smaller incidents that we had here on the range where were miners are left down there.
and passed away and didn't come back up.
We'll get to all that but let's talk about the morning of September 24th.
So it had been raining right and the weather was turning cold in September and we got rain and rain and rain.
And there had been some worries about G-shaft going back for quite a while, actually.
You loaned me some newspapers.
I found stuff from 1913 that talked about safety problems, and they were going to make sure G-shaft was OK back 13 years before this event.
I wish we had the time to really, really get into it.
But on the morning of September 24th, it had been raining, ground was soggy and loose.
Three electricians got into the shaft elevator there, Thomas Rowell, Gustav Sell,
and Avar Gustafson got in and an inspection had just been done on the shaft and those guys had gotten out.
The three electricians got in and then this cave in occurs and it's likely the most recent thing that caused it was all the rain.
And at first it sort of trapped them and then it crushed them all the way down to the bottom of that shaft there.
The football had been showing signs of giving for a long time.
One of the things that they were duly noting going up and down in that little elevator was the irregularity that they were hitting in the rail.
Now, something caused that, all right?
You have debris that is falling off the sides, as well as all that water that you're talking about.
You know, you got the kiddie pool on top there, and all this debris is falling off the column.
And then we talk about, you know, this is G-Shap we're talking about.
G shop never was stable.
Okay, right from the very beginning if you go back to the early history like if you look at some of the fatalities that mr. Cox says
you know, compiled in relation to the mining fatalities in Guggenburg, Coney as well as Iron Coney in Wisconsin.
G-Shaft's been sort of a problem with child, you know.
Yeah, and you mentioned Bruce Cox, who wrote the book Perfectly Safe.
He's written a bunch of books about mining history.
He's an incredible resource here.
Nearly everything that I've learned about this disaster comes from Bruce Cox's work.
Who'll be joining you at the roundtable with Ivan next Saturday.
So excited about that.
But you talked about how
how when they're going down this elevator there was this bump and there was some stuff sticking out and more than one person had noticed it and it's kind of one of those situations where
You know, if you're a little nervous about it and you mentioned it to somebody on the team, like, hey, you know, what's up with that bump right there?
It doesn't seem right.
It seems like the general answer was, oh, it just does that.
The condition of the small debris coming down from there because number one, it's falling out of the wall.
Some of it's practically floating.
You know, you got always reinforced steel concrete and stuff like that.
Hey, it's great to have all that reinforcement, but whatever it's
to if that's shifting, it doesn't matter.
That's exactly right.
You know, all you got is more concrete to clog the shaft opening.
And when you're, when you're working in conditions like that, I guess you just tell yourself everything's okay until it isn't.
Until it isn't that.
Yeah.
You
know, and so this cave-in, it causes the elevator to just plummet all the way to the bottom at which point it gets crushed.
by everything.
And then there were men working on different levels who were able to get out.
But the eighth level, they were trapped right underneath where a lot of the cave in got trapped.
Let me just get into the minutiae for one minute before they started getting out of hand.
Two of the apprentices were on top of the cage, okay, looking for damage, so they could get a better angle, spotting something.
Now debris, small pieces and stuff like that, probably drove them back inside of the cage, all right, and then you get all that accumulation that begins to happen on top of it, and all that torque that's going on with the cable that's holding it up, you know, these guys are gonna go 2600 feet.
So we got 43 men on the eighth level,
And, uh, Mining Captain Tom Travartha, who is a Cornish gentleman, I do believe.
A lot of experience in mining.
A well respected guy there.
He thought very quickly and right away they showed up the entrance to that tunnel on the eighth level in case there was another cave in so that they could at least have some place to hold up and be safe.
And it wasn't easy for these men at all.
Like, I mean, a good day wasn't easy in G-Cheft, but they didn't know how long they would be there.
They didn't know if they would get rescued.
They weren't sure that, you know, there was no radio, nothing going on, no telegraph.
And so Travartha, he did this amazing job of keeping the
focused on tasks.
You've got Polish miners in there, Finnish miners, Cornish miners, probably some Italian folks in there as well.
And one of the stories from Cox's book I found incredible was one of the ways that they passed the time was by seeing the hymns from their own church in their own language.
Right, but a lot of the turn of the century animosity isn't there, okay?
Ethnicism.
Not when you need each
other to
survive, right?
No, you know, friends are communicating, but Italians here, you come over, have some grappa, you meet my daughter.
You
know, it's becoming more Americanized, more than anything, but it still had those strong ethnic traditions, okay?
So there was the best of both worlds there.
where you could be an American and you could be as Italian as you wanted to be at the same time.
And that is just particularly true of minors, OK?
You learn to love your own race or your own nationality, but you also learn to love the guy's nationality that's next to you.
Oh, yeah.
When you guys are both made depend on it.
Yeah, your nationality in 30 seconds might be warm food.
Well, you know, one of those one of those ones to bring people together.
climb it you know hey it broke through and this guy is up on top and he grabs you okay I'm talking about life-changing situations that we're not even aware of or can necessarily weave into that history it doesn't unite that it didn't happen
While the men were down there, the story became national news and the nation was just gripped to the wire waiting for information.
There's probably, I'm sure there were radio updates, but print media just went wild with it.
The reporters came from everywhere.
And so these men are trapped down there.
They don't know how long they're going to be there.
Travartha had them all put their food together so they could ration
it.
There's an initial period of time where they have no contact
with each
other.
I mean, I don't know how many hours that would be or whatever.
Probably maybe the scene
seemed like it was on two days.
It seemed like it was a couple of days before they started to hear the
anxiety that that induced alone.
OK.
Yeah.
So, yeah, you know, to take a look at it from that standpoint.
Meanwhile, up at the top of the shaft, you've got wives and children and family and people from the city gathering.
Praying waiting these men are down there.
They're they're not sure what's going on They were trying lots of different ways, right?
They were trying to use a diamond drill down from the I think the seventh level Yeah, and then they tried to make a tunnel from f-shaft
So they could get this drill on the second level in
there
I'm trying to
go straight down at least get him air or something drop him some cigarettes
pills and everything else down there, you know and um
And now they did get a couple of levels, you know, but I mean, but they could hear this, you know, that's one of the first things that they did hear on it.
They were hearing explosions and
drilling, doing that dentist thing, you know, from from second level.
So
that, yeah, they also tried to make a tunnel from F shaft.
And I think they eventually made their way over from H, right?
Yeah, they were going to do a side track on a raise on G shaft and then come up above it and go right
down.
It was, you know, I mean, they were trying everything.
Well, they eventually just figured out a way from H shaft to kind of get over and they just on the fly built some ladders and lattices and did whatever they could to get up.
They did find a way to get
through one of the cave-ins that had fallen below the eighth level and then they found their way into G-Shap and they were able to get to these men.
I mean, going several hundred feet like that in jewelry rigging, you know,
after
things you're doing because the rungs aren't in the ladder anymore.
No, we're not, you know, you don't have that many miners on the ground and everybody's waiting around to go to the 16th floor.
I mean, it takes a long time and it's very dangerous.
I mean, it's dangerous with the ore that's being transported.
If you're in the same shaft with that and you're a passenger,
Come on, you wonder why you have accidents like this.
I mean and these guys they they tried to explore and find their own way out only to discover that they were trapped anyway they sliced it.
And then somehow, you know, these, and it was local miners doing the rescuing, you know, it was other miners that, you know, it wasn't in call in feds or one any of that.
It was just these guys got down there and just got straight to work.
And thankfully, you know, the mining companies gave them resources and support.
If you're going to have a work ethic, you know, if you're going to go at it, you know, trying to rescue yourself by shoveling and moving debris and all that, you got to understand, you're not at the same oxygen level.
No, and
you're gonna
have to sit down every five minutes or so because you're gonna fall on your face Okay, it's you don't know how much oxygen is available
and you don't know you don't know when you're gonna be fully out of food either They started drinking birch bark tea off the timber yeah, I
mean you talk about above and beyond yeah
Didn't have any middle metal struck for the birch bar,
you know I mentioned a minute ago the efforts of the mining companies themselves It seemed like there were some efforts.
I seem to remember you telling me a story about how they brought up Pullman cars Did they breathe I think you told me a story about how they brought up Pullman cars
People are beginning to like whether it's in relation to Pennsylvania coal fields or in this area or on the Masabi or one of these
They're trying to figure out how they can move ahead with binding safety practices.
Unfortunately, not all backwater areas are going to have the same degree of saturation.
Now, when you've got 43 guys that are underground for a while,
And we don't know if we're gonna get them all alive.
Yeah, you're gonna get noticed, especially on a national level, okay?
All of a sudden, the technology is falling.
You got a safety cart, this big Pullman.
And it's been out like...
a hospital on rails.
And that thing is on the PAPS property before you notice park, not
that
far from on a G chat.
If it was some guy, you know, or two guys that got trapped in a conventional accident, you know, or something like that.
Probably wouldn't happen.
Yeah.
So after 130 hours, uh, they finally start getting these men out and they, and this was not an easy thing.
I can't imagine what it had been like.
to have been trapped for 130 hours without much air like you were talking about, not much food.
And now you got to climb down from the eighth level down to what, the 22nd or just, you know, all the way down there down a ladder that's missing rungs, walking across planks that are slippery and wet because again, it's all wet down there.
And then I mean, you got to go down a thousand feet to go back up 2000 feet.
Then cap give vote.
You know, a captor was on there, they had to lock him up, you
know?
Many of them got on the surface though he moved,
you know,
because that's one of the things that's sort of part of the human element, the human side of this.
It's their family.
Get to the wife, get to the wife, get to the kids,
you know,
and I mean, through everything.
You
know, because you got people that just want to mob them, you're absolutely beside themselves.
That concludes part one of my interview with Larry Peterson to commemorate the centennial of the Papst Mine disaster.
Please join us Friday morning at 8 30 for in our range for the second part of this interview as we talk more about the disaster itself and the upcoming events to commemorate the centennial of the Papst Mine disaster.
Thanks for joining us here on in our range.